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Jonathan Merritt
"... no, I don't think ''you get it." - Jonathan Merritt will happily educate you however. Involved clerk to the court and sorcerer-for-hire gone awry, now with slight (but very important) case of possession and tangled agendas. There may also be some madness, but that comes with the territory. BEFORE ME As a native Englishman, Merritt comes from a long line of people who've heard about the sun more often than they've actually seen it. (He's one pale mofo is the point here.) He is of a basically average height and has that skinny wiry sort of build people get when they habitually forget to eat but do a lot of walking. His hair has ''ideas of autonomy. He has what looks like a bruise along his sternum. He really doesn't want you to see that, so piss off. There is nothing very special about the clothes he wears, and he carries himself like a reasonably upstanding citizen of his age and time. BEHIND ME The short story is that Jonathan Merritt was born into a middle-middle-class type family. He neglected his studies in favour of dickikng around with magic, but ended up in the Crown Prosecution Service in spite of (or because of) this. He is under the patronage of a magically inclined Mrs Hargrive who wields a lot of political power in the CPS, and he has a magically inclined friend called Eleanor Harrows (Ms Ella to her friends). Somewhere in here, he begins trading his supernatural skills for cash and favours. He later contracts silicosis through accidental magical means and is left with crippled lungs and a short life-expectancy until he makes a deal with a thing. The deal in question is basically "you get some place on the physical plane to live/hide/exist, and I get this pesky blood/oxygen thing squared out". THE TL;DR STORY AS FOLLOWS Merritt did not do very well in school. He will tell you this is because he was bored by a curriculum too simple for his vast intellect, but this isn't really true; he was merely a distractable slacker. This could have been was entirely due to a nerdy (but pretty rewarding) interest in the supernatural. (And be honest, who is going to focus on arithmetics when you can talk to the dead?) His mother was from a fairly decent family who covertly disowned her when she married his father, a lowly clerk to the court. She was not particularly disheartened by this and went on to become a nurse and a really excellent knitter of wool cardigans. She has been reasonably supportive of her son, even if she harbours concerns in her heart that he might have the gayness. (He never did seem to shown a proper interest in girls.) His father was much too autistic to notice (or much care on the occasions Mrs Merritt has brought the point up late at night), and felt that he could be proud enough of his offspring going to law-school. Truth be told, young master Merritt would much rather have studied history and natural science. He only ever did aimlessly ended up studying basic levels of law because that's what his parent(s) would expect. He wasn't very good at it. If any noted scholars would ever deign to look upon his life they would attribute his poor scholastic results to a genuine disinterest in English (and Welsh) Law and a more genuine interest in supernatural laws. Aunt Hargrive and Miss Ella Of course you cannot go around being a huge magical dork (and a general reckless danger to others according to some) without someone noticing. In Merritt's case, it was Mrs. Hargrive. Mrs. Hargrive works for the Crown Prosecution Service, and she practices sorcery. She sees no problem combining these two careers, however she can't really take a lot of time out of her busy life to educate the newbs. Thus she settles Merritt with a miss Eleanor Harrows. Harrows is a little older than Merritt, and (at the time vastly more experienced in the ~occult~). It's a bit awkward in the beginning, but they work things out (LIKE ADULTS) and eventually become great friends. Thus Merritt now has a teacher and a ~*friend*~ (this is huge, shut up) as well as a patron. Life moves on, like it does. School is eventually out and Merritt goes on to work for Mrs. Hargrive at the CPS. He also works with miss Ella with what we can loosely refer to as magical troubleshooting. The names Merritt and Harrows kind of become a thing in certain circles. They do a lot of interesting things, and get involved with cool stuff while getting to know some fascinating individuals. I am being purposefully vague in italics. The Ash-Breathing Demon Merritt would say that demon is a misleading word. It puts ideas into people's heads about church paintings or extras in rubber suits on some afternoon rerun of supernatural dramas. Something that spits hate at you from the deepest pits of Hell and whose moral compass points firmly to EVIL which simply isn't ... completely true. Reasonable people will probably argue hair-splitting and request that we move on already. The reason for this meandering word-making on his side is a sense of professional nerdship (later to be amplified by ironic professional kinship); Merritt is really good at summoning things. You could say this is where his expertise lies. One day in London (Monument station, roughly at teatime) something goes horribly wrong. A bad memory is unleashed upon the public and it takes the shape of a fire in the subway. This is of course bad as is, but to make matters more interesting, the fire has some supernatural connotations. It's a very angry fire. Someone has to deal with it, and as it happens our friends Harrows and Merritt are neighbourhood. LONG STORY SHORT(er) they stop the damn thing, but not before it can bite Merritt in the lungs with a billion hungry siliceous teeth. :E ... none of this is really anyone obvious' fault (which sucks because blaming people always helps), but there you go. Off to the hospital with our injured hero(?), who -- when he has been cleaned off, had various shots to ward off infections, stopped coughing up blood and creepy black goo, and generally slept for a few days -- is extremely discomfited. Unhappy even. These feelings of malcontent are however nothing compared to his feelings on learning this condition is chronic and permanent. Thing may have been thrown. gdi, life Life with acute supernatural silicosis sucks ass, as the kids would eloquently put it. Suddenly there are a lot of things you can't do, such as exert yourself physically (in any way), live a long life, go a day (or night for that matter) without coughing like death itself, smoke anything or, on that note, largely go outside in central London. They give you a bronchodilator, asthma medication that don't work, recommend oxygen therapy and suggest that maybe you should go live a sedentary life somewhere outside of densely trafficated areas. The disease changes everything for Merritt. He has a hard time coping with his new disability and nothing frustrates him more than being unable to practice the esoteric supernatural nonsense he used to take for granted. He's informed that he can of course keep his job -- he is still very valuable, what with his skills and huge squishy brain full of stuff -- but Merritt is initially too busy sulking and longing for a career in advanced alcoholism to give it any serious thought. He does a pretty good job of alienating everyone he's ever known as he stews in his resentful misery for a good long while. Harrows comes by every now and then, and he eventually forgives her for feeling sorry for him. Sometimes they even talk, and Merritt has a lot of ideas. Harrows isn't sure these are especially good ideas, but she helps him where she can anyway. It's just what friends do, and besides she's motivated by roughly equal parts guilt and curiosity. Merritt and Not Merritt One day, Harrows gets a text from Merritt asking her to come over. Since she is a busy woman with a life of her own damn self it is not until after she's called him a few times and gotten no answer that she sort of grudgingly makes it over there. What she finds is ... surprising. Merritt is home, certainly, at least she thinks he is. She finds him sans shirt, sitting on the floor by an open window smoking a cigarette. He appears drunk or high, and she gets out of him at this point is various versions of "I did it" which to be fair isn't very reassuring at all. What is this it then? Well as Harrows figures out (by being clever, knowledgeable and persuasive), the it Merritt has been working on for a really long time and finally brought to fruition is a deal of some kind. Not with the Devil -- he is not Faust -- but with a much (much) smaller thing willing to trade proper oxygen/blood distribution for a place to hang on the physical plane. There ... may also have been some side effects, but who cares, fuck you, lungs. This is of course Of Interest to people in the field (if you will), especially Mrs. Hargrive who is torn on the issue. Perhaps she should have seen this coming, perhaps this is something dangerous and wrong and she should do away with master Merritt. But then again, Merritt has always been useful, and this thing could turn out to be beneficial. For everyone. Because honestly the way things are going perhaps the best thing to have in your stable is a crazy angelic demon person. If nothing else other people will probably want him (numerous reasons! such as murder, study, prophet-ing, reunion, ...stuff, etc), by default makes him valuable. Political savvy, ahoy, etc. AT MY RIGHT SIDE Merritt is a ~*sorcerer*~ above all else, and his approach to sorcery is rather scientific. Actually his approach to everything is rather scientific, he is one pragmatic sumabitch. It may have occurred to him that it is a rather bizarre approach to a life steeped in the occult and mystical, and he is sort of fine with that. You can't afford to take things too seriously, and besides, paradox is dead useful. Dealing with people who don't understand things he regards as self-evident is often frustrating for Merritt, and he will take the time to explain all sorts of things to a willing listener. His oh so scientific nature lends itself well to that of an educator, but this isn't something he contemplates. He has grown pretty self-aware post that whole humiliating god-damn-it-my-lungs-don't-work ordeal, which has aided his sense of humour and feeling for the absurd. Whatever actual humility he could have taken away from that however has been thoroughly squashed by the sense of arrogance and joy of overcoming the condition. He's never been an idealist, and he's never going to be. He has huge potential to turn his natural cynicism into more serious schemes of exploitation of everything but he's not there yet. On the kind of slightly acceptable(?) side of things, he's pretty good about not judging books by their cover and what not. Everyone is potentially useful, and he's really good at seeing people. He will talk to you regardless of your apparent social status, and he will talk to you as if though you were an ~*equal*~. Unless you're obviously better than him, or he's in a mood, but hey. Not Merritt doesn't have a personality. So that's handy. It is more of an aspect of Merritt himself. When it shines through it contributes unbridled curiosity, a slightly crippled control over the sensory input he receives from the world around him and a bizarre paradoxical childlike naïveté. (This is not endearing or disarming in any way.) It may grow into something more disconcerting over time, but then again it may grow into a model citizen as well. Time will tell. It is generally agreed upon (or would be if we could get a peer-review put together on this) that the day Merritt realises that he doesn't strictly speaking have to do what he's told will be a very interesting day indeed. Leftover Trivia He severely dislikes being naked or in any stage of undress near other people (which would put a crimp in his sex-life, if he had one). He is most definitely on the spectrum, as it were, though no one professional has ever confirmed (or denied) this. At least he is high-functioning, ey. On a Myers-Briggs typology test he would score INTJ and then reject the results. AT MY LEFT SIDE Skills and assets, skills and assets! Well let's see. He really is very good at what he does when it comes to magic. He is largely ritual based with a foundation in Thelema adapted to his own sensibilities and style. There isn't a lot he can't do, but he likely need a lot of time to figure out how to do something and if it would be worth it in the end. Technically he can turn to his patron (Mrs Hargrive) for aid if he need be. This is totally unfair would be especially useful for getting out of trouble with the law. (Obviously this comes at the price of being available if said patron needs him for something.) He has a law-degree which is he unlikely to draw anyone's attention to. Not sure if asset, but if you put him under a lot of stress he might leak scary supernatural stuff. ... .... what else. uh. stuff. Category:The London Mysteries